The just shut down recycling in my area, they closed 4 drop off points. It was privately run and the company just shuttered the entire operation. They said they were losing money and it got worse monthly. Seems the price and demand for recycled goods has dropped considerably.
Based on this article it isnt just in my area.

f you are recycling at home, you are probably doing it wrong.That is why a worker lunged to grab a garden hose off the conveyor belt at a Waste Management recycling facility here Wednesday before it got caught in a giant sorting machine. Such tangles frequently require the plant to stop the waste processing line and clean out the jaws by hand.
"Our contamination changes by the season," said Mike Taylor, the company's director of recycling operations here. Since it's spring, the facility is getting a lot of garden hoses. Around the holidays, they get broken strands of Christmas lights, another choking hazard for the sorting line. And all day every day there are plastic shopping bags (recyclable at a grocery store but not from a household), chunks of styrofoam, diapers, syringes, food-contaminated containers ... a nearly endless litany of things that residents throw into their curbside recycling carts figuring they are or ought to be recyclable. One worker grabs the remnants of a screen door off the sorting line while another snags a wire rack from a DIY shelving unit.
Many cities around the country will celebrate the 47th Earth Day on Saturday by highlighting their recycling programs, but the industry is grappling with a dual threat: The value of recovered waste products has plummeted over the past five years, and the amount of effort required to extract them has risen.
A study by Rob Taylor with the State Recycling Program in the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality estimated that the average market value of a ton of mixed recyclable material arriving at a recovery facility in the state dropped from just over $180 in early 2011 to less than $80 at the end of 2015. That value has since rebounded a bit, Taylor found, to a little over $100, but it still leaves the industry struggling to extract profit from the millions of tons of recyclable material Americans throw away every year.

There are a host of reasons for the decline in the recycling market, ranging from global trade policy to the decline in newspaper readership, said David Biderman, executive director and CEO of the Solid Waste Association of North America. Much of reclaimed American waste is shipped overseas, but China erected new limits on imported waste in 2013. In other nations, "there has been a decrease in demand for that material as growth rate in foreign countries has leveled off," Biderman said. Low oil prices have made it cheaper to produce new plastic bottles, so manufacturers don't have as much need for reclaimed plastic. In addition, packaging producers have figured out how to make bottles and cans thinner, so they don't need as much raw material.
And as the circulation for print newspapers has plummeted, the recycling industry has lost both a massive customer for reclaimed paper fiber and a huge source of incoming recyclable material.
Across the recycling industry, "what was once a valuable commodity five years ago is less valuable now," Biderman said.
The change is perhaps most dramatic for glass. In most American cities, the glass bottle you toss in the recycling cart is essentially worthless, and if it breaks, the shards may make the paper in a mixed cart worthless as well.
"We work hard to keep glass in the system because it is an iconic recycled item," said Keefe Harrison, CEO of the Recycling Partnership, a non-profit committed to improving recycling programs nationwide. But "it has very minimal market value because it has to compete with sand," which is the raw material glass is made from. Some municipalities have simply stopped collecting glass in their curbside recycling programs. Santa Fe overhauled its recycling program this month and said it would no longer collect glass from households. Residents are being asked to take their glass to four drop-off centers around the city.
The Elkridge facility sorts a lot of glass, Mike Taylor said, but it "doesn't add value" to the waste stream. "You can't move it long distances without paying hefty freight rates," Taylor said, so "it’s a negative-value material for
us at the processing facility by the time you separate it and then try to truck it three or four or five hundred miles to get it to a market.”





https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...lem/100654976/